Picture the problem. A spy is stranded on an ice floe near the top of the world, far beyond the reach of any helicopter, on ground where no aircraft can land. How do you get him home without stopping?

The Cold War answer was gloriously insane: you fly past at 125 miles an hour, snag a balloon-lofted line with two horns bolted to your aircraft’s nose, and yank him straight up into the sky. It was called the Fulton surface-to-air recovery system — the Skyhook — and it actually worked.

The mail-train idea that became a spy tool

The inventor was Robert Edison Fulton Jr., a restless American adventurer who had once motorcycled around the world. Working for the CIA from 1950, he studied how British trains snatched mail bags from trackside hooks and set out to do the same thing to people. By 1958 he had it: a drop package with a harness, a 500-foot braided nylon line, a helium bottle and a dirigible-shaped balloon.

The person on the ground buckled in, inflated the balloon, and let the line rise. A pickup aircraft — a B-17, later a P2V Neptune, later still an MC-130 — flew straight at a marker on the line with two tubular horns spread from its nose. The horns caught the line, a trigger locked it, the balloon let go, and the crew winched the passenger aboard.

A pig, then a sergeant

The first live pickup was a test animal, because a pig’s nervous system is close to a human’s. It did not go smoothly. The pig spun wildly in the 125-mph slipstream, arrived aboard “dizzy and discombobulated,” recovered its wits, and promptly attacked the crew.

The first human, Staff Sergeant Levi Woods, went up later in 1958. He discovered the trick the pig had not: spread your arms and legs and the spinning stops. Six minutes after the line snapped taut, he was inside a P2V Neptune. Decades later, a Lockheed engineer who ran the final test program put a number on that first jolt.

Operation Coldfeet

The Skyhook’s finest hour came in 1962. A Soviet drift station, NP 8, had been abandoned on the Arctic ice. The CIA wanted to know what the Soviets had learned about hunting submarines under the ice cap, so two men — Major James Smith and Navy Lieutenant Leonard LeSchack — parachuted onto the floe, gathered the abandoned Soviet equipment and documents, and waited.

Days later a B-17 returned in near white-out conditions and 30-knot winds. The extractions were rough — one man was dragged across the ice and swung wildly before he steadied himself — but every man and every pound of intelligence came off the ice. Back aboard, the mood was, understandably, celebratory.

From the Arctic to the movies

The Skyhook served for decades before longer-ranged helicopters finally made it obsolete; the U.S. military retired it in 1996. But it never quite left the popular imagination. James Bond rides one out of the sea at the end of Thunderball, and Batman uses the very same trick to snatch a man off a Hong Kong rooftop in The Dark Knight.

It remains one of the most audacious ideas the Cold War ever produced: not a gadget for the movies, but a real machine that really did pluck real people off the ice and into the sky.

Sources: Damn Interesting; Avaunt Magazine; CIA Studies in Intelligence (William M. Leary); Wikipedia (Fulton surface-to-air recovery system). Some figures come from participants’ recollections.